leaned in closer to hear him. “Yes?”
“Will…you…have your way with me now?”
She laughed and shook her head. This one was something else.
“No,” she assured him, not quite able to erase the smile from her lips. “I won’t have my way with you.”
“Too…bad.”
And then there was no more conversation. His eyelids had won the battle and closed down.
Chapter Four
He was being watched.
The unshakable sensation of having a pair of eyes fixed on him, on his every move—from close range—bore through the oppressive, thick haze that was swirling around him.
Alain struggled to surface, to reach full consciousness and open his eyes. When he finally succeeded, only extreme control kept him from crying out in surprise.
Approximately five inches separated his face from the dog’s muzzle.
Alain jerked up, drawing his elbows in under him.
The salvo of pain that shot through him registered an instant later. This time, a moan did escape.
In response, the dog reared up and licked him. Alain grimaced and made a noise that expressed something less than pleasure over the encounter.
“Welcome back.”
The cheerful voice was coming from behind him. Before he could turn his head to look at her, Kayla moved into his line of vision.
She’d changed her clothes, he noticed. It looked as if she was wearing the same curve-hugging jeans, but instead of a T-shirt, she had on a green pullover sweater that played up the color of her eyes—among other things.
It took him a second to raise his gaze to her face. “How long was I out?”
She bent to pat Winchester on the head. The dog had spent the entire night at Alain’s side. There was a definite attachment forming, at least from the dog’s point of view.
“You slept through the night,” Kayla told him. She had spent it in the chair opposite him, watching to make sure he was all right. “Rather peacefully, I might add.” And then, because he’d mentioned a woman’s name during the night, she couldn’t resist asking, “Who’s Lily?”
That question had come at him from left field. Did this woman know his mother? It seemed unlikely, given that she was wrapped up with her animals, and the only animals her mother liked were the two-legged kind. In bed.
Alain watched Kayla’s face as he answered, “My mother. Why?”
“You called out to her once during the night.” She cocked her head, curious. “You call your mother by her first name?” She’d been around six years old before she even knew her parents had other names besides Mommy and Daddy. She couldn’t imagine referring to either of them by their given names.
“No, not really.” Since he couldn’t remember if he’d even dreamed, he hadn’t a clue as to why he’d call out his mother’s name, and he didn’t know any other Lily. But he was more curious about something else. “You stayed up all night watching me sleep?” Why would she do that? he wondered, feeling oddly comforted by the act.
Kayla laughed as she shook her head. “We’re a little rural here, but I’m not that desperate for entertainment. No, I didn’t stay up all night watching you sleep. I spent part of it sleeping myself,” she assured him.
In actuality, she’d spent very little of it asleep. His breathing had been labored at one point, and she’d worried that she might have given him too much of the medication, so she’d remained awake to monitor him. But she didn’t feel there was any reason for Alain to know that.
“Nothing I wouldn’t have done for any of my other patients,” she continued nonchalantly. “Even if you don’t have fur.” And then she looked a little more serious. “How’s the head?”
Until she asked, Alain hadn’t realized that the anvil chorus was no longer practicing their latest performance inside his skull. He touched his forehead slowly as if to assure himself that it was still there.
“Headache’s gone,” he said in amazement. The way it had hurt last night, he’d been fairly certain it was going to split his head open. And now it was gone, as if it had never existed. Except for the state of his ribs, he actually felt pretty good.
Pleased, Kayla nodded. “Good.” Moving away from the coffee table, she turned toward the kitchen. “Hungry?”
He was about to say no. He was never hungry first thing in the morning, requiring only pitch-black coffee until several hours after he was awake and at work. But this morning there was this unfamiliar pinch in his stomach. It probably had something to do with the fact that he hadn’t had any dinner last night, he reasoned.
He nodded slowly in response to her question. “Yes, I am.”
Kayla caught the inflection in his voice. “You sound surprised.”
“I am,” he admitted. “I’m not usually hungry first thing in the morning.”
He was probably always too busy to notice, she guessed. People in the city tended to spin their wheels a lot, going nowhere and making good time at it. She should know; she’d been one of those people for a while. “Country air will do that to you.”
Her comment surprised him. “So you consider this the country?”
That seemed like an odd thing for him to ask. “Don’t you?”
Alain laughed shortly. “Last night, I considered it Oz,” he admitted. “But usually ‘country’ means farmland to me.”
She supposed there was an argument for that. To her, any place that didn’t pack in a hundred people to the square yard was the country.
“There used to be nothing but farms around here. We’ve still got a few.” And she loved to drive by them whenever she had the chance. Not to mention that the families on that acreage were always opened to taking in some of her dogs. “Corn and strawberries, mostly,” she added.
Ariel was shifting from foot to foot behind her, silently reminding her that she had yet to be fed.Which brought Kayla full circle. “So, what’s your pleasure?”
The question caught him up short. Without fully realizing it, he’d been watching the way Kayla’s breasts rose and fell beneath the green sweater with every breath she took.
As for her question, he wasn’t about to give her the first response that came to his lips, because he doubted that the beautiful vet would see it as anything more than a come-on. And maybe it was, but he’d never meant anything more in his life. His pleasure, at the moment, involved some very intimate images of Kayla—sans the green sweater—and himself.
“Whatever you’re having,” he told her, glancing toward Winchester. The dog was still eyeing him, an unrelenting polygraph machine waiting for a slipup.
His answer satisfied
